Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  Rather astonishingly in light of the great reverence then given Civil War veterans, “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” purports to speak for the thousands of soldiers who “got just a taste” of the war and “stepped out again permanently.” For the future author of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), the theme of this essay—at least where it introduces the accidental shooting of a stranger—reads more like his “The War Prayer” (1905), in which war is seen as a paradox about right and wrong. Joan, “the Maid of Orleans,” of course, claims that she never killed anyone while leading the French through a series of bloody victories over the English. In the “Campaign That Failed,” Twain is likewise confronted with the paradox of war, or legal homicide.

  In his 1885 essay, Twain makes fun of the general confusion over slavery, especially in the state of Missouri. But it was not funny in 1861. This border state faced a double bind. Not only was it divided to some extent on the question of slavery, but it was also literally divided up—physically scattered—by the war. Once Missouri was neutralized by Federal troops early in the war, many of the state’s battalions followed their chosen leaders south. Indeed, in one of the few references Twain made to the war while living in Nevada, he alludes in 1862 to Northern troops chasing Missouri irregulars all the way to Arkansas before defeating them. He also expresses some regret that he was not among the defenders of his state.11 No doubt he was forgetting that when he was in the war, he and his ragged band of Marion Rangers had made a virtue of retreating while under the impression that they were being chased by Federal troops. In drenching rain and lightning, the experience had taken “all the romance out of the campaign and turned our dreams of glory into a repulsive nightmare.”

  “In time,” Twain claimed, as he had not that night in Chicago, “I came to know that [the] Union colonel whose coming frightened me out of the war and crippled the Southern cause . . . [was] Grant.” Actually, this connection was also an exaggeration, for Twain had already left for Nevada with Orion by the time Grant’s troops reached Florida, Missouri. Yet Twain had tentatively entitled his Century article “My Campaign against Grant” and insisted in this war story, or tall-tale version of the truth, that he had come “within a few hours of seeing him when he was an unknown as I was myself; at a time when anybody could have said, ‘Grant?—Ulysses S Grant? I do not remember hearing the name before.’ ” The man who, as he said of himself in the essay, was better fitted for “a child’s nurse” than a soldier falsely claimed to have crossed the path of Lincoln’s fiercest general.12

  Mark Twain’s response to the Civil War and his actual role in it would come to reflect his life as a literary person and a humorist. Just as Huck and Jim inadvertently go south in search of freedom, Twain ultimately went north—both literally and psychologically—in search of a clear conscience. He first went west, of course, and it was in Nevada and California that he stumbled upon his great talent as a writer. This success gave him the humorist’s cover under which to return to “the States” as “Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope” instead of Confederate Deserter. Following his tour of the Sandwich Islands and his beginning as a lecturer in San Francisco, he went east to become the kind of funny man the nation sorely needed after a long war and a presidential assassination. It was time to laugh again, and so he began his fame as both a lecturer and a humorous travel writer, most significantly in The Innocents Abroad. Interestingly, one of the most prominent passengers expected on the Quaker City cruise that was the basis for his first travel book was to be none other than General William Tecumseh Sherman (who ultimately did not sail with the ship). Twain’s timing couldn’t have been better—from failed soldier to America’s wittiest writer in a mere six or seven years, famous initially for a jumping frog. Never mind the fact that he also became one of the country’s most gifted writers, evidenced almost immediately in those beautiful passages in The Innocents Abroad. That fame as a serious author was always destined to be posthumous, because in the long shadow of the Civil War he required the cover of the clown. It was this necessity, possibly more than anything else, that kept him trapped in the anti-hero’s costume during his lifetime. As Clara Clemens wrote in her memoir of her father, ironically invoking battle imagery: “He had fought his way on the battlefield with the fire of a soldier, but his weapons had been that wit and humor which is born of profound human understanding.”13 In other words, his literary handicap became the agency of his brilliance as one of America’s greatest writers, humor notwithstanding.

  As noted, Twain conceded in the “Campaign That Failed” that he was not cut out to be a military combatant. Even Whitman in one of his lighter-headed moments claimed he was prepared for actual combat.14 Yet he was too old at forty-three, whereas Twain was only twenty-six, though he claimed to be two years younger in the essay whose Century illustrations by E. W. Kemble tended to portray his military experience as a Tom Sawyer episode. Many years ago the literary historian Fred Lewis Pattee pointedly asked, “What of Mark Twain during this Gethsemane [Civil War] of his nation, when hundreds of thousands of his generation were dead upon the battlefields of the South that had been his home?” The neo-Confederate poet Edgar Lee Masters charged Twain with the equivalent of draft evasion: “There is no vestige of conviction in anything that he did in facing the war.”15

  Yet in spite of Whitman’s brief boast, the poet never volunteered for military duty, while Twain did enlist. It is also important to note that Twain knew about his brother’s appointment as secretary of the territory of Nevada long before he joined the Marion Rangers in a war he thought, like everybody else, would last no longer than three months. News of the Nevada appointment reached Orion in St. Louis by March 27, 1861, when Twain was still in the city, taking time out to earn the apprentice and master degrees in the Masons. By now he was out of work as a Mississippi River pilot because of the war. In other words, it is clearly possible that after almost being drafted into Union forces, Twain initially chose combat in Missouri over silver mining in Nevada, at least to defend his home state from invaders if not fight for the losing cause of the South. According to Albert Bigelow Paine, Orion agreed to overlook his brother’s defection to the South and make him his “secretary” in Nevada if Sam paid for their overland journey.16 But this information certainly does not rule out earlier discussions between the two brothers on the subject of Nevada. Whatever the case, Mark Twain, it appears, paid a high price for his war record, and publishing Grant’s Memoirs therefore became a holy cause to him. Fortunately for American literature, Sam Clemens did not pay the ultimate price in war by meeting then-colonel Grant on the field of battle. Instead, he “fetched” the former general and U.S. president on the speaker’s platform fourteen years after the war. In doing so, he made amends—in his own mind, at least—for his ineptitude as a soldier.

  9 Lighting Out

  The day Sam and Orion departed from “the States” at St. Joseph, Missouri, was exhilarating. It was July 26, 1861, “a superb summer morning, and all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine.” The two brothers felt, as Twain recorded in chapter 2 of Roughing It, a “sense of emancipation from all sorts of cares and responsibilities.” The relief that Sam felt in getting away from the war was his main source of exhilaration. Orion, on the other hand, was now traveling for the Union, to a job as secretary of Nevada Territory, which would pay him a salary of eighteen hundred dollars a year. For all Sam knew, he was a wanted man after lighting out from that colonel’s office in St. Louis and then serving in a military unit that was, ostensibly, dedicated to the Confederacy. Sam Bowen would be arrested that fall as a Southern sympathizer. At first, Clemens’s escape hadn’t run very smoothly. Before boarding the Overland Stage at St. Joseph for Carson City, he and Orion had to travel for six days on the Missouri River. Its shallow bottom and frequent shoals made it necessary to run the boat deliberately over the many snags and reefs and sandbars. “In fact,” Twain recalled in the first chapter of Roughing It, “the boat might almost as well h
ave gone to St. Joe by land, for she was walking most of the time, anyhow.” Otherwise, that first leg of their trip west was so uneventful that he could recall little else about it.

  After two years of prosperity as a pilot on a bigger river, Sam Clemens’s prospects for the future didn’t appear rosy. Like Ulysses S Grant at the beginning of the war, it may have seemed to Samuel Langhorne Clemens that his success in life was already largely finished. But the war was already well on its way to elevating Grant (whose troops would soon sweep through the Hannibal area), whereas it had dashed Clemens’s livelihood on the river and was now dispatching him out west to a job that had no established salary. It was in a way like returning to his brother’s employ in Hannibal as an unpaid assistant editor. To make matters worse, because of Orion’s general state of poverty, Sam was paying the four-hundred-dollar stagecoach fare for both of them.

  In fact, memory of the entire trip to Nevada was so difficult to retrieve nine years later when he was writing Roughing It that he had to ask Orion for his recollection of the particulars of the journey. “Do you remember any of the scenes, names, incidents or adventures of the coach trip?” he inquired rather desperately as he began his “600-page book.” “I remember next to nothing about the matter.”1 He didn’t remember because he was probably preoccupied during the whole of the trip with what he would do once he got to Carson City. He had heard, of course, of the silver-mining fame of the Comstock Lode. Perhaps this would get him going again. Relying on Orion’s specific record of the trip for the “facts,” the first twenty chapters of Roughing It are a quasi-fictional work by an accomplished artist whose second book, The Innocents Abroad, had become a surprising success. This professional travel writer knew how to fill in the interstices of an itinerary, not with the philosophical digressions of a Henry David Thoreau in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), but with the miscellany of travel books. Yet the western philosophy of Mark Twain comes through as well as his humor.

  On day two of their journey out of St. Joseph, July 27, they entered the Nebraska territory and saw their first jackrabbit. On the third day they reached Fort Kearney on the Platte River. They were still in the age of the short-lived pony express mail carrier, prior to the telegraph and railroad connections that made this vast land more familiar to Americans. There were many novel sights in those days—prairie dogs, coyotes, and Indians. Twain saw resemblances in the last two, noting that the coyote “will eat anything in the world that his first cousins, the desert-frequenting tribes of Indians will.”2 These Native Americans were still dangerous to white settlers and travelers, and it would take Twain several decades to get over his bias against the “red man.” Sam and Orion’s stagecoach averaged about 125 miles a day, traveling just over five miles per hour seven days a week. Journeying out west then was like going abroad today in the sense that one had to travel lightly. In St. Joseph they had been forced to send back home most of their luggage. A pony express letter traveled twice as fast, but it cost two dollars an ounce to mail, like the featherlike envelopes sent to and from the United States to Europe before the advent of e-mail.

  Noah Brooks, the editor of the San Francisco Alta when Twain went abroad for that newspaper on the Quaker City in 1867, had made a similar journey across the Great Plains that he later described in an article about Twain. “Imagine,” he wrote at the end of the century, “a long caravan of emigrants stretched over the vast and comparatively unknown region lying between Missouri and the Pacific Ocean, numbering many thousands, but broken into innumerable bands and companies . . . while passing through the haunts of hostile and predatory Indians, but often passing and repassing one another when some travel-worn party would be camped by the trail for rest and recuperation. . . . Here and there, at exceedingly rare intervals, we found the deserted cabin of some vanished explorer or trapper, in which were posted the rude bulletins of those who had preceded us.” 3 This historical moment paralleled the impressions of Orion and Sam as they pushed into the wilder regions of the North American continent.

  They passed Fort Laramie on the night of July 31 and found themselves the next morning in the Black Hills of the Dakota territory. Here they were definitely in hostile Indian country. It is at this point in the narrative of Roughing It that Twain introduced the saga of the notorious Jack Slade, the murderer who met the future Mark Twain. Or at least this is what Twain claimed in his book. It was on the ninth day of their journey. Sam was having breakfast at the Rocky Ridge station when he froze as he heard someone address a stranger as Slade. “Here, right by my side,” he wrote in Roughing It, “was the actual ogre who, in fights and brawls and various ways, had taken the lives of twenty-six human beings, or all men lied about him!” The coffee supply ran down to one cup. Slade, who suffered intervals of civility, politely offered it to Sam, who just as politely declined because he was afraid Slade “had not killed anybody that morning.” 4

  Just beyond South Pass City, they encountered “banks of snow in dead summer time.” They were now high in the Rocky Mountains where the low clouds gave them “a sense of a hidden great deep of mountains and plains.” He described the mountains as “Sultans” turbaned in clouds. On the afternoon of August 4 they reached Fort Bridger, where they were told that its troops “had fired upon three hundred or four hundred Indians, whom they supposed gathered together for no good purpose.” By the next day, they stopped for two days at the Mountain Dell station at Salt Lake City. The first night, Bemis, their fellow passenger, got so drunk on “valley tan,” a Mormon whiskey, that some of his words “had more hiccups than syllables” in them. 5

  Since Orion was now secretary of the neighboring territory of Nevada, they met the acting governor, who introduced them, as Twain noted, to the other “Gentiles.” He wasn’t a Mormon, and neither was his successor in September, Frank Fuller, who would become a lifelong friend of Sam’s. The acting governor and the governor were both secessionists who had refused to serve in Lincoln’s administration. One had already left for the South, and the other would shortly, when Fuller arrived the next month. In Roughing It, Twain misremembers that it was Fuller whom they met in Salt Lake City. 6 These officials were only the first of many secessionists Sam would encounter in the Union territories, especially Nevada. Even though Virginia City was predominantly Union in its support, Southern support abounded out there, including even Sam, who would instigate a miscegenation hoax against the U.S. Sanitary Commission in the Territorial Enterprise in 1864, as we shall see.

  Sam and Orion did meet the famed Brigham Young. This was on August 7, 1861. Young talked state business with Orion and the acting governor, but he completely ignored the secretary to the secretary in spite of his several attempts to “draw him out.” “He merely looked around at me, at distant intervals,” Twain wrote in Roughing It, “something as I have seen a benignant old cat look around to see which kitten was meddling with her tail.” This perceived snub may in some way be the catalyst for Twain’s disdain of Mormons in his book, expressed not just in his inclusion of a condemnatory account of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in appendix B but also in his general joking around about their polygamous habits. About their first day in Salt Lake City, for example, Twain wrote, “We felt a curiosity to ask every child how many mothers it had, and if it could tell them apart.” 7

  Most likely this appendix and another on Mormon history were intended as chapters 13 and 14 of his book. His publisher Elisha Bliss may have thought they formed a digression in the narrative or were perhaps too acerbic; they were probably reinstated as appendices when Clemens had trouble reaching the six-hundred-page minimum demanded of subscription books in an era in which readers felt that anything less did not give them their money’s worth. (How times change!) Chapters 15 and 16, on the polygamy of the Mormons and their bible, struck a balance between satire and outright criticism. In the first the typical polygamist is described as “some portly old frog of an elder . . . [who] marries a girl—likes her, marries her sister—likes her, marries anoth
er sister—likes her, takes another—likes her, marries her mother—likes her, marries her father, grandfather, great grandfather, and then comes back hungry and asks for more.” The chapter on the Mormon bible, however, reveals the author’s Protestant objection and bias. There is nothing “vicious” in the Mormon creed as stated in their bible, only that its stories are structured like the Old Testament and its language is also “smouched” from the New Testament without giving any credit. 8

  With six hundred miles still left between them and Carson City, they crossed the Great Salt Lake Desert and the Ruby Mountains in Nevada. Two hundred and fifty miles along that stretch, they entered Rocky Canyon and came across the Goshute Indians, a tribe of five hundred “braves” whom Twain derided as bushmen “manifestly descended from the self-same gorilla, or kangaroo, or Norway rat, whichever animal-Adam the Darwinians trace them to.” As already noted, he was still in the early stages of his Indian hating, exemplified as much by his direct attacks here on the Goshutes as in his mockery of the idealized image of the Indian in the works of James Fenimore Cooper. While he never got over Cooper’s excesses and would much later in life satirize them, he softened on his view of American aborigines as he learned more about their treatment by the U.S. government. 9 He never went as far, however, in his humanitarian view of Indians as he did with his sympathetic portrayal of blacks and the Chinese workers he encountered in the West. In the 1890s he came to satirize Cooper’s cigar store Indians as unrealistic. Earlier, in the unfinished “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians,” written in 1885, Tom learns a cruel lesson about the difference between Cooper’s “book” Indians and the real ones, who prove to be stone-age savages who kidnap—and rape, it is clearly implied—the heroine of the story and murder her parents.